“Bruxism” and “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT”

BRUXISM

or Fragments for the lonely

There are mornings so brutal that even the brutality is

redundant.

The geometry of the body is a hindrance.

Maybe we’re pornography for the new gods

the discarded vision of the old.

We are all lusting for an apocalypse perpetually delayed.

Sometimes you feel stranded at the turnstiles in your own

mind.

Trying to take medicine while standing at the sink, I forgot

how to swallow. The chaos of…of forgetting such a

mechanical process unmoored me.

Those nights where the funk of loneliness lingered, like city

sewage, on the bus home.

Nights that I had

A boredom so profound

It collapsed in on itself into

A solid sphere

Sometimes I worry that I squandered my youth.

I should really leave the house.

I think I’m in a relationship with my ceiling fan.

PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT

In the industrial zone

You fiddle with the music and it gives me time to think

To think up a new language

For what it is we’re doing

It’s possible to want absolutely nothing from someone but

Take everything anyway

Sometimes the stench of loneliness lingers in my airways

It clogs the tear ducts and restricts the breath

I study the anatomy of loneliness

As I scratch at the compulsive claustrophobia on my skin

But to call it fault is too pedestrian

I’m a Tupperware of want: plastic and awkward and stupid

I want the right to be idle.

What I want is a place where I don’t have to be beautiful

Crepuscular minds speak the same tongue

And the heart speaks with a stutter

And there may not be a language

But when it hails you

You do not refuse

Jenny Samuel (she/her) is a writer based in Hamilton. She is obsessed with the apocalypse, the bizarre beneath the quotidian, and the creative ways  with which we try to cope with the loneliness of the human condition. 

She also hates the phrase 'human condition'.